Report

Pretext Securitization of Boston’s public realm after 9/11: Motives, actors and a role for planners

links

Pretext Securitization of Boston’s public realm after 9/11: Motives, actors and a role for planners

“Pretext securitization of Boston’s public realm after 9/11: Motives, actors and a role for planners” by Susan Silberberg is the culminating chapter in Policing Cities: Securitization and Regulation in a 21st Century World (Routledge, 2013).Silberberg identifies the changes in Boston’s public spaces and privately owned “public” spaces after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 and assesses the motives, players and planning roles in these public realm transformations. The picture that emerges is one of a changing informal network of private sector actors and varied securitization motives and methods within the context of minimal public oversight. As public discussion heightens after the April 2013 Boston Marathon bombings, Susan Silberberg’s assessment of the planning landscape and identification of key areas for concern and focus provide a useful framework for urban advocates and public officials to move forward in an uncertain world.

The chapter is part of "Policing Cities,” Randy Lippert and Kevin Walby, Editors, which “brings together international scholars from numerous disciplines to examine urban policing, securitization, and regulation in nine countries and the conceptual issues these practices raise. Chapters cover many of the world’s major cities, including Boston.

The collection examines the activities and reforms of the traditional public police but also those of emerging public and private policing agents and spaces that fall outside the public police’s purview and which previously have received little attention. It explores dramatic changes in public policing arrangements and strategies, exclusion of urban homeless people, new forms of urban surveillance and legal regulation, and securitization and militarization of urban spaces. The core argument in the volume is that cities are more than mere background for policing, securitization and regulation. Policing and the city are intimately intertwined. This collection also reveals commonalities in the empirical interests, methodological preferences, and theoretical concerns of scholars working in these various disciplines and breaks down barriers among them. This is the first collection on urban policing, regulation, and securitization with such a multi-disciplinary and international character." - Routledge

abstract

TitlePretext Securitization of Boston’s public realm after 9/11: Motives, actors and a role for planners